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Pictures from Meguiar's 8/8 Thursday Night Open Garage

Forum Member Old Bear, started the nice off with some touch up paint on his Honda Civic.

Next we worked on a Ceramic Coating installation gone wrong on a blue Subaru BRZ. We ended up showing the owner how he could remove the coating. We used M205 Ultra Finishing Polish on a DMF5 D/A Microfiber Finishing Disc.

Mario from Performance Detail stopped by and tried out some D166 Ultra Polishing Wax on his silver Audi.

Re: Pictures from Meguiar's 8/8 Thursday Night Open Garage

I thought I would update on the scratch repair on the Honda.

First, this was intended to hide the scratch and not full paint restoration.
The kit was purchased with this intention in mind.
This black paint covered in burgundy pearl (colored mica) is not going to match perfectly.

Results:
Actually, 3 weeks later and I am surprised that it hides the scratch as well as it does.
Prior to the repair, I could see the scratches as I approached the car in my sunlit garage with two compact fluorescent light fixtures and a large 4 foot tube LED that all come on automatically when I am in the garage.
I used to be able to see the scratches on the drivers door as I approached the drivers side rear fender.
Since they got there in the first 10 miles of owning the car, they really upset me.

I cleaned the car again yesterday evening.
I had to either get within 6 inches of the rear drivers side door and look toward the front, or get about six inches from the scratches themselves to see them.
With the TNOG good lights directly on them, they were clearly visible the night we worked on it.
It seems what we see is the paint not fully filling the depth of the scratch and we see the reflections of the edges of the scratched clear coat.My result is that I don't get really upset anytime I get close to the driver's side of the car.

Since this was my first attempt, I wanted to share shore some of what I learned.
The plan included three attempts to hide the scratch.
Partially to learn and also to try to build up the paint depth in the scratch.

Since the goal was to try to fill the narrow scratch, I choose not to use the "use the thumb to knock the paint into the scratch".
I chose to use one of the tiny paint daubers to apply the paint.
As time passed between the attempts, the paint on the dauber began drying out.
It would be best to plan on multiples daubers.

On the second and third pass, we used the small squeegee to flatten the paint.
Thin very lightly removed the excess paint.

The first image below is a close up of the scratches.
The second image is enhanced with a simple drawing to show how the paint ended up, yet only filling about half the depth of the paint.
The third and forth images show simple drawings that show the problem discussed next.

In the third image, we see a (simulated) blob to your left of the scratch in the image.
It took a lot of extra wiping to remove this on all three passes/
That contributed to lowering the amount of paint in the scratch.

The fourth image shows a simulated red line between the blob and the scratch.
I now believe is that when the scratch was originally inflicted into the paint surface, that clear coat at the red line was raised above the previous level.
That gave the paint in the blob area the ability to hide as if it was in a valley.

I think if we had used 3,000 grit and a very small sanding block, we could have leveled it out.
Then we could compound that down to flatten the area and very slightly round the near 90 degree angle along the top edge of the scrathed clear coat.
This would have added by not giving the blob a valley to hide in and by reducing reflectivity at the top of the scratch on the clear coat.
I will contact the kit mfg. to see if they agree.

Paul optionally suggested adding a clear on top, masked off to keep it almost just over thee scratch.
Then that could be lightly sanded with 3,000 grit on a very small sanding block and compounded out.

The dark purple in images 2, 3 & 4 are best thought as ink pen drawing on the image for illustration purposes.
The paint matched much better.